Spooner (47 page)

And what happened was that for a little while Calmer ran loose. Spooner and Darrow and Cousin Bill drank Falstaff beer until
their feet could not touch the car floor for the empty bottles, and along the way Calmer decided he wouldn’t mind having one
or two himself, even though he was at the wheel, and they drove all over the dirt roads of eastern South Dakota all afternoon,
the back roads of Calmer’s childhood, stopping for warm nuts and beer at the little stores where the dirt roads crossed, talking
to the locals—although this appealed more to Spooner and Darrow than to Cousin Bill, who had not ended up on an island in
the middle of Lake Michigan because he craved the company of strangers—then back in the car, speculating on the sex peculiarities
of the family’s cousins and aunts and uncles.

It was a wonderful hunt, nobody so much as winged or deafened; in fact no shotgun was even discharged within the confines
of the car. For all Spooner knew, it was the safest hunt in the history of the Whitlowe family, and half an hour into it Calmer
was himself again, almost the way he’d been in the years before he was ruined professionally, moving in and out of the car
like a dancer, as if there was nothing in the world he dreaded, and then, too soon, they seemed to notice all at once that
the sun was going down, and it was time to head home. Spooner’s mother was fixing a roast.

They were an hour out of Falling Rapids when the sun set, and as the dark closed over the prairie it closed over Calmer too.
Late for supper. Spooner watched his old man’s afternoon grace disappear into worry. Calmer stopped once to call home, but
there was no answer. After that he held on to the steering wheel as if someone were trying to pull it away from him, and changed
gears by rote, without regard to speed, and the engine coughed and bucked. A man who had landed planes on the decks of aircraft
carriers driving like an eight-year-old farm boy having his first turn behind the wheel.

They hit the city limits right at seven o’clock. Darrow and Cousin Bill in the backseat, Spooner up front with Calmer, all
of them except Calmer still drinking, but quietly now; Calmer focused a long way down the road, no longer with them at all.
Little cracks of worry everywhere in his face. They drove along the northern boundary of Kissler Park, past the brick mansions
that stood facing it—car dealers, doctors, attorneys; Spooner’s mother had once claimed she could smell the Republican money—and
then onto a street canopied in elm trees where the houses were not so big but were still a long ways up from Milledgeville
and Prairie Glen, and drove another half block and stopped in front of the gray, two-story house that was the net financial
return thus far into the life of Calmer Ottosson. Not much for what he had put into it; not even a farm, and most of it still
belonged to the bank. The car was quiet a moment, then someone in the backseat moved and the beer bottles rattled. Seven-fifteen
p.m., pitch dark, eerie as a pasture of blind cows.

It was Cousin Bill who finally broke the silence. “Oh, boy,” he said, “the missus has turned out the lights.”

Even his critics had to admit that Cousin Bill had an uncanny insight into the workings of human intercourse. In fact, it
was one of the great mysteries of the Whitlowe family how, with this uncanny insight and his willingness to blurt it into
the public arena, he’d managed his own human intercourse so well, or had ever gotten laid at all. But there he was, successful
in business, lucky in love, beloved by his wife, who looked like more fun than the circus, and a large family—for all Spooner
knew, the greatest man in Michigan.

Calmer pulled the old Buick into the driveway, past the house to the garage. From there, they could see the back of the house,
which was as dark as the front. It didn’t have the look of abandonment—the paint was fresh, there were no weeds in the yard—but
at the same time it was a shade too quiet for a place just shut down for the night; what it really looked like was one of
those farmhouses out in the country where the old farmer dies and the widow stuffs corncobs into the light fixtures to save
on the electric bill.

They went into the house through the side door and found her sitting in her bathrobe at the kitchen table, in the dark. Her
atomizer was on the table, next to a glass of tap water, and when they walked in she gave herself a couple of hits off the
atomizer, making sure that everyone understood the situation. Not only was the roast ruined, so was her ability to draw oxygen.

They had all seen this kind of behavior before, of course, even Cousin Bill. It was the way generations of the Whitlowe women,
one of whom, after all, was Cousin Bill’s mother, kept blood relatives in line.

“The roast is ruined,” she said, as if the cow itself had died of inconsideration. She took another shot off the atomizer
and pulled it deep into her chest. She had the humidifier on and the air in the room was as wet as fog. Spooner’s mother fought
for every breath, and Spooner was suddenly conscious of his own breathing, and soon found that he could not clear his head
of its mechanics, the in and out. When Spooner’s mother was on her game, she was as good as there was, or ever had been.

Calmer appeared pole-axed but calm, at least not monitoring the workings of his own lungs.

“Well, there’s still beer left,” Cousin Bill said, and he turned on the kitchen lights. Everyone squinted. Beyond his uncanny
insight, Cousin Bill had another quality unique to the Whitlowe family; he could
recover
, could overlook the scene just presented, for instance, as if it had never happened. “There’s nourishment in beer,” he said.
“Quite a few vitamins, actually.”

Spooner’s mother said, “I’m afraid I don’t feel well.” Impenetrable even to the charms of Cousin Bill. She turned away from
them, walking right past Calmer, moving like a much older woman would move, and disappeared into the bedroom.

Calmer thought about it for only a second or two and then went in after her, and Spooner and his brother and his cousin did
not see either of them again all night.

They found the roast in the garbage under the sink, and it wasn’t bad, although Cousin Bill would remark the next morning
that he thought it could have used a little more time in the oven. But then, his branch of the family liked their beef well
done.

And that was really all that happened. Five humans of various blood relations got together for a weekend, four of them drank
beer and went hunting, three ate some beef out of the garbage. In the morning Calmer went back to work and Spooner’s mother
came out of her bedroom and sliced cantaloupe for the boys without mentioning the previous evening, and in the afternoon the
boys all started home, and a week after that, the letter arrived with Spooner’s morning mail.

When Spooner thought about it later, it seemed to him that the letter was the closest thing to an apology his mother ever
issued.

Not that she specifically said she was sorry—not in this life—but she did offer an explanation for what happened, which went
like this: Her father died, then Spooner’s twin brother died, then her first husband died, then the ruination of the roast
beef.

But it was more than that. Things happen, after all, in a context. The Whitlowes had once been wealthy and prominent in Milledgeville,
only to be ruined during the Depression. Her father, who was dead years before Spooner hit the ground, had been a famous football
player at Brown University, then a famous coach at the state university, then a state senator, and then a businessman of sorts,
part owner of a lumberyard, and then the Depression hit, and, like most people who went into business for themselves, he didn’t
know what he was doing and went broke.

Spooner’s grandfather was a legend now, a man’s man and the relative whom Spooner was supposed to favor most, although it
was Spooner’s brother Phillip who resembled all the pictures of him that Spooner had seen. But then, Spooner was no good at
matching faces with pictures and by now had lost even the sense of what he himself looked like, and often caught himself glancing
at his own reflection in windows, like some dog sticking his nose into his own rectum every ten minutes to remind himself
who he is.

B
y his own estimate, it was now the second half of Spooner’s life, which was not some actuarial calculation of middle age but
the hard fact that his point of view had been altered, and there was no going back to the way things had looked before, when
he was closer to the ground.

He hadn’t come gradually into his second half, but all at once, in those minutes he’d been left awake on the operating table,
and afterwards, as evidence of the change, his body, which did not care for the new perch, began a sort of food strike, regularly
tossing whatever arrived into his stomach back out into the world. This was now his body’s answer to miseries of all kinds—worry,
torn knees, torn nails, broken bones, form letters from the IRS, Mrs. Spooner’s PMS, other people’s vomit, dead pets—whatever
it was, he’d blow lunch. Afterwards, perhaps not so strangely, he would feel lighter, and often relieved.

Thus, the minute Spooner saw his mother’s handwriting on the envelope from South Dakota, his stomach stirred, and he took
the letter into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub to read it. Forewarned is forearmed. Due to his mother’s penmanship
and the length of the manuscript, it took him half an hour to finish. But he did finish, every line right down to
Love, Your Mother
, and then had to move only a step or two to reach the toilet, where he chipped a tooth—one of his replacements from the evening
in Devil’s Pocket—on the bowl. It was a small chip, but felt strange to his tongue.

He put the letter on his desk, waiting to feel lighter and relieved, but another half hour passed and he didn’t feel relieved
at all, and the letter was still there, nine pages long, folded into thirds, lying face-up in a shaft of sunlight from the
window, opening on its own like some poisonous flower. Spooner didn’t want to read it again—he didn’t want to touch it again—but
he would, he knew, and he did. Twice that week, and then again, after she died. But never after meals.

For Spooner, the worst of it was a single line at the bottom of page six:…
and then Calmer came along, and you two kids needed a father, and so that was that.

There were other parts that were not good—after all, it was a nine-pager—but that line, that single line. Spooner would always
wonder what she expected him to think when he read it, and he was reminded again that he’d grown up under strange rules. The
strangest of these rules, of course, erased the fact of Spooner and Margaret’s father from history, but this was barely stranger
perhaps than the apparent understanding between Lily and Calmer never to have cross words with each other in front of the
children. Somewhere, somehow, it had been decided that parental conflict wasn’t good for children’s development. How exactly
this conflict avoidance was supposed to groom Spooner and his sister and brothers for adult life was never clear, and when
Spooner’s first marriage began to fall apart, they might as well have put him in a room with a screwdriver and a hammer and
told him to fix the television. Spooner sometimes wondered if the whole family wouldn’t have been better off if they’d all
just blown lunch when they were miserable, like he did.

Or, absent that, if his mother could have brought herself to get it out of her system some other way, to scream at them—
You drunk bastards ruined the roast!—
and throw a pan at Calmer’s head, or at Spooner’s head (he wouldn’t have minded) and then a week or two later drop him a post
card saying
Sorry about your head
, instead of a nine-pager containing the story of her life. The difference being that Spooner would never hold a lump on the
head against anyone. That was miles from unforgivable, and who was he, after all, to cast stones? Still, there was a line
somewhere, and the letter from his mother crossed it and somehow obliged him to declare where he stood.